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jimrandomh comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread - Less Wrong Discussion

42 Post author: Costanza 29 December 2011 11:23PM

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Comment author: jimrandomh 31 December 2011 08:14:54AM 1 point [-]

what do total utilitarians and average utilitarians actually mean when they're talking about the sum or the average of several utility functions?

They don't know. In most cases, they just sort of wave their hands. You can combine utility functions, but "sum" and "average" do not uniquely identify methods for doing so, and no method identified so far has seemed uniquely compelling.